July 11, 2016
Hillary Clinton, then United State secretary of state, with Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time, at the Diaoyutai Guesthouse in Beijing on May 3, 2012.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
BEIJING — Hillary Clinton is blunt, negative on China, friendly toward homosexuals, and female — all reasons some Chinese give for not wanting to see her as the next president of the United States.
She is highly qualified, visionary, caring, and will support women and children and development around the world – reasons others give for wanting her to win the November election.
As China looks ahead to a new American administration, opinions on the front-running Mrs. Clinton veer from admiration, mostly among women and civil libertarians, to distaste, mostly among male policy makers and an often nationalistic public.
Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has his critics in China, too, but his brand of shock-populism attracts more vocal support in a society where a woman has never sat in the inner circle of power, the Standing Committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo.
Still, China’s leaders would rather see Mrs. Clinton in the White House than the “volatile” Mr. Trump, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing and an adviser to the State Council, China’s cabinet.
“Trump is volatile, and the worst situation is instability,” Mr. Shi said in an interview.
China’s economy and it needs a good relationship with the United States, now more than ever, Mr. Shi said, adding that his comments were his own and did not necessarily represent the leadership. “This is very sensitive,” he explained.
China’s leaders traditionally do not comment publicly on American presidential candidates.
“Trump is an autocrat,” he continued. “Maybe, with some luck, you can make some trade-offs with him. But if he became president, he would take quite a protective and nationalist policy towards every country.”
“Personally, I prefer the lesser of the two evils,” he said. “If she becomes the U.S. president, we are familiar with her.”
For Chinese policy makers, that familiarity may offer limited comfort.
Although Mrs. Clinton is seen as having pushed for stronger Chinese-United States ties at the beginning of her tenure in 2009 as President Obama’s secretary of state, and is credited in China with facilitating an annual dialogue between top Chinese and American officials, she also angered Beijing by pressing for “the pivot,” Mr. Shi said. This rebalancing of United States power toward the Asia-Pacific region, in response to China’s growing assertiveness, was seen as an effort to “contain” a rising China, and it rankled some top officials.
Then too, “when she conducted U.S. foreign policy on China, Iran, Russia, during the ‘Arab Spring’” in 2011, Mr. Shi said, “her language and style of discourse were direct and much more blunt than Obama’s on issues such as human rights and website control.
“The impression she left in China is quite negative. She criticized the Chinese government’s control over information freedom, said it was not compatible with international norms,” he continued.
“Chinese people liked her husband. Bill Clinton was a very nice guy. Obama is also a nice guy. No one says Hillary is a very nice lady.”
Lin Lin does.
“I really admire her,” said Ms. Lin, 36, an events manager in Beijing. “Hillary has many years of experience in politics as first lady, and in her personal career she dedicated herself to politics. I think she’s very smart and a much better person than Trump.
“As a female professional, I do want Hillary, because the difficulties she has met didn’t stop her but made her strong. She’s a heroine.”
Yet it is not just a feminist issue, Ms. Lin said.
“My friends, female and male, like Hillary because of her experience, not because she is a woman,” she said. “I think she is a good leader. She should do what her country requires her to do. I totally understand.”
If Mrs. Clinton wins, Chinese leaders will face a president with experience in China going back decades, when she mainstreamed women’s rights in 1995 by declaring at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights.”
Guo Jianmei, a lawyer and feminist, was there that day.
“People crowded onto chairs to hear her,” Ms. Guo said. “She had charisma, style, knowledge, strength.”
Not long afterward, Ms. Guo founded China’s first feminist legal aid center, the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center. In February, the authorities closed it as part of a continuing crackdown on civil libertarian groups.
Ms. Guo said that since 1995, she has met Mrs. Clinton six times, in China and in the United States.
“I feel there’s something else special about her,” Ms. Guo said. “I feel like she has a really global view of development. Not just for women, but on overall issues, including the economy.”
The conference on women’s rights might have influenced Mrs. Clinton’s views on China, Mr. Shi suggested, saying she was “not affectionate” toward the Communist Party. It took place at the height of China’s one-child policy, when many women were being forced to have abortions, among other abuses.
“One thing is consistent,” Mr. Shi said. “She has always been quite negative towards China’s human rights situation. We don’t know if it was the Beijing women’s conference, maybe that had some effect.”
Still, he said that Mrs. Clinton’s election would offer some pluses for policy makers in China.
“She was really one of the major advocates for special parts of the relationship with China,” Mr. Shi said. “She appealed very much for the great power relationship. She personally pushed a lot for the creation of the S&ED,” the annual United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which held its first meeting in 2009.
That optimism may be out of date, with Mrs. Clinton growing more critical as she settled into the job of secretary of state. In 2010, in a speech in Hanoi, Vietnam, she laid down a gauntlet to China, saying the United States had a vital interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. This infuriated China, which claims most of the sea as its own.
Six years later, friction is never far away. When Mrs. Clinton posted on Twitter last year that President Xi Jinping was “shameless” in connection with the detention of five feminists, Global Times, a leading state-run newspaper, hit back, saying that Mrs. Clinton was learning how to be a “big mouth” – from Mr. Trump.
In Chinese social media, comments on Mrs. Clinton often focus on her gender.
“Her femaleness makes her unpopular,” Mr. Shi said, adding that her image on the internet in China is of “a harsh lady.”
Even in the Paper, an online news site that caters to an educated, politically interested elite, readers’ comments can be both sexist and ageist.
“That woman is so old, why isn’t she at home taking care of children?” commented Da Peng on a report of the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 68-year-old Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. (In China, the retirement age for most men is 60, while for women it is 55 for civil servants and employees of state enterprises and 50 for most others.)
A barrage of critical comments about Mrs. Clinton’s attendance at a gay pride event in New York also showed unease with her support for gay rights.
“She must support this from her heart because she’s one of them,” wrote Chunni18.
But comments on a Sanlian Life Weekly article about a campaign event in May, when Mrs. Clinton was photographed with two shirtless male supporters, showed that she has admirers, too, amid growing awareness of gender and sexuality issues in China.
With thumbs up and smiley faces, several commenters who speculated that the men were gay expressed their support.
“The LGBT community has long backed Mrs. Clinton,” wrote Yunzhou manbu.
Ultimately, Mr. Shi held out hope that a Clinton presidency would not mean an upheaval in relations with China.
“If Obama was 70 percent negative about China, she’s 75 to 80 percent,” he said. “It’s not too much more.”
